Slashdot Mirror
Brits Still Working on Stinky Email
prostoalex writes "British Internet provider Telewest Broadband is testing a system, which allows people to attach specific smells to their e-mail. It works with air freshener cartridge that one plugs into PC. The technology is developed by a US-based company Trisenx, which features the products and pricing on its Web site. A 20-channel serial port device costs $269, the same price for optional software package allowing the user to author specific smells. The replacement cartridges are $48 each." They're hardly the first attempt at adding smell to the computer experience. Digiscent didn't work out so well.
think what the porn industry could do with this?
Personally, I don't want to know what sort of smell would be associated with penis enlargement spam...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Now spam smell like its true name...
Cheap Viagra.
The real litigious bastards...
For smelling, the price stinks too! ;)
DrkBr
What smell would you send to Darl?
Am I just missing it, or is there no possible use for such a device? What would it do that anyone would pay $300 for one?
Just the concept makes me want to become a spammer.
Wishing I was a millionaire since 1969.
Je blague, mes amis...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Just what I want when I receive an email from rms is to *smell* him too.
This technology would be more useful in France.
Brings a whole need perspective on what is possible with tubgirl.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I'd hate having to smell hundreds of cans of SPAM each day doing through and deleting junk email. ...unless if I was hungry that day..
$cat
This *reeks* of failure (no pun intended)
Rapid Nirvana
Now I can fart on my brother even when he's not around.
Who would want their computer spraying smelly stuff, whenever it felt like it - whether the smell was good or bad. I don't think it would ever smell good, anyway - it would always smell artificial - just like all the air fresheners that are supposed to smell like flowers. Too perfumy for me.
to reply to all those spammy emails with the smell set to:
beer-fart
Part of the beauty of email is that I don't _have_ to smell someone to communicate with them. Being as I work in software development, this is a big plus.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
The sense of smell is perhaps the most diverse when it comes to preferences. Just think of all the colognes/perfumes out there that end up delivering the opposite effect. Unless you know exactly what the user likes, giving them a scented email may look creative but runs the risk at the same time of offending the receiver.
And no expensive cartridges to replace. Anyone up for Broccoli and Egg Salad?
Sure, the smell of "tuna" would be nice alongside pr0n spam, but the hippy stench from linux user email would be unbearable.
This is great, sniff your inbox to find out whats in it.
Smell like womans perfume? Its porn spam
Smell like crotch? It's penis enlargement spam.
/unavoidable
Porn Spam would have a very specific smell to it. If you could do the same thing with web pages, a lot of people would get in trouble when the wife went sniffing around the computer.
If we could do this with packet level traffic it would give a whole new meaning to a network sniff (Yes sir, I suspected the router because it smelled like the homeless man outside your building.)
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
This would be perfect for wine and stinky cheese.
While this is a Whacky technology, it could ad alot VR games like quake or Half-Life or even D&D style games.
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
So, every time I check my mail, not only will I be reading Spam, but it'll smell like Spam too?
-_-_-
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
I wonder how long it will be before the PIAA (Perfume Industry Association of America) sues...
or does this sound like something the Japanese would invent?
Technoli
I wouldn't call it the worst idea ever, but it does stink of bad business plan. How are you supposed to make money selling these things? Who's going to pay two hundred seventy dollars for the "convenience" of letting someone across the internet burn through the fragrance in a fifty dollar scent cartridge?
What's the target market for this thing?
It's finding a way to scan in your farts that is the hard part...
How did they find out exactly what I would never buy for my computer? This is amazing!!
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
/me starting to send shit-flavoured mail to M$
Just beacuse you can, doesnt mean you should.. geesh!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I DO NOT want to get spammed with e-mail from goatse.cx on that system!
Hmm... send that fresh bakery smell to your Atkins buddies.
Who on earth would want their whole room to stink up whenever they get an email? Or a hundred? I don't think this will work out.
Oh wait....it's my screensaver.
So, if I get an email from France is can smell like France. Can we get some kind of smell filter like a spam filter?
Evolution or ID?
Take care!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Maybe I am just not thinking hard enough. It is Friday after all....
'Internet! Is that thing still around?' - Homer Simpson
I love how all of their examples uses are things like "it could be used by supermarkets to tempt people with the smell of fresh bread or by holiday companies seeking to stir up images of sun-kissed beaches."
Explain to me why I'd want to use up my $48 dollar stink cartidge (heh) on spam?
Smell like womans perfume? Its Rob.
Smell like crotch? It's Cowboy Neal.
where your computer fires smells out at you! I bet the smells would come from a unit you get free when you purchase a system, only to discover the refill cartridges cost half of what the dispensing unit costs retail. Then, when you start buying refill kits you can use at home, the company installs a microchip preventing you from manually refilling the unit. what an age we could live in!
...just like chicken.
I love the picture of the "typical user" in the article. She's got a nice portable laptop, plus this huge aroma thing that looks like it's too bulky to fit in any laptop bag. Did she bring the laptop and connect the device in case she got a smelly email? Or did she have to go and get the device when she realized she had gotten a smelly email?
Plus, she's eating - her taste/smell senses are already being used. So, now she's eating musk-perfume-flavored stawberries, and we're expected to believe that this is enjoyable? Pretty picture, yes. But poor marketing.
Also: "Telewest says its "scent dome" could cost around 250 and would only work with a high-speed, broadband connection." -- WTF? The device produces only 60 smells - so is 6 bits now too big to send over a slow modem?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
And I thought having a cdrom open randomly was bad.... Just wait for the smell extension
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how long it'll take our resident Nintendo troll to latch onto this thread with his amazing Smell-o-Vision? =)
While I can't imagine why someone would want one of these, I have to wonder why the article states the device requires a broadband connection.
I can't smell, you insensitive clod!
Your email smells like coitus.
What did you expect?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why on earth would someone want to pay $250 so that they can smell their spam mail? Come on people, someone answer me that? Furthermore, I am troubled by a quote in the article: Telewest says its "scent dome" could cost around 250 and would only work with a high-speed, broadband connection.. So what they are saying is that the unit can produce up to 60 smells (that's 6 bits of data), and I need a broadband connection to get that data? I don't buy it. (pardon the pun)
A winner is you!
Great, as if your idiot uncle wasn't bad enough at family get-togethers, you can now look forward to emails that read:
Pull my finger
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
sex smells!
Smells? No chance!
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
if the scent is that of the standard of their broadband service, you dont want it, trust me!
Stinky computing for people who stink ....
Do we really want to know what penis enlargement smells like?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
One of my former colleagues had a product name thought up for this type of device at least four years ago: SmellBlaster(tm)
Snebjorn
Faster-Harder-Louder
You know it's all gone to hell when people talk about it being "farked."
Now They don't have to eat horribly for days on end to create "the worlds worst smelling fart" they are just one email away.
...it stinks too!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
btw, this is meant to be a funny....
This "technology" will die sooner or later. Have anyone heard of "smell-o-rama?" Scratch smelly paper while watching a movie? In some theaters smell was delivered via air-conditioner/duct. This type of attempts have already made at least a few times in the film business and they all failed to survive. Who would bother buying smell cartridge for emailing?
Next variant of MyDoom virus will cause a smell of your armpits. How exciting our future can be. I'm so thrilled.
Wow, this sure gives new meaning to the term "vaperware."
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
We've had jokes about smell-o-vision for about as long as we've had television. I guess the modern update is applying smells to e-mail. The consumer applications are a bit questionable, but there is an interesting scientific level below this...
In order to transfer a smell from place A to place B, we need a notation scheme that can combine various levels of a small number of "elemental" smells, just like RGB are the elemental colors of light and CMYK are the elemental colors of pigment.
Once there are devices that can take a smell, store it in the digital notation, and then reproduce it, the bottom is going to fall out purfume industry quick...
gaah. repeat after me...'smell' is a verb, not a noun. one can smell an odor. one can smell without stinking. dog doo doo can stink but it cannot smell.
Life is short; think quickly.
They had a fire yestreday which took out their cable TV service. If I had had one of these devices I could have smelled it and not have had to spend 15 minutes in a telephone queue!
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
A 20-channel serial port device costs $269
... what the hell were they thinking, using legacy ports only? It's not like aiming at an ever shrinking customer base (laptops or Macs come to mind as machines w/o legacy ports) was bad business... ;p
Apart from the horrendous price tag and the questionable need for suche a device...
How about sending your loved ones a quick hit of LSD, or a tab of e, or maybe the scent of pot for a nice 'contact high' ? The new Drug Dome comes with 20 lab-quality chemical compounds which can be combined to form 60 separate drugs. Co-worker feeling a little anxious about a presentation? Email him a quaalude. Girlfriend not putting out? Send her a couple of tabs of e.
For the record, rumors that the Drug Dome has been hacked to dispense a single blast of all 20 drugs at once are false.
We are currently beta-testing a refillable Drug Dome, using a modified Linux kernel (Methix), the chemicals, their mixtures, and dosages can be completely customized by the end user.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Am I dreaming? This is like something from the dotcom boomtimes when an idea got more money for seeming wacky and apparently useless.
Human don't use smell very much, anymore. For the most part, it's just figuring out whether the milk is OK to drink, or if the person next to you needs a bath. There are subconscious pheromonal responses, but hopefully they aren't loading this thing up with those. "Yes sir, we discovered the 'buy stuff' pheromone."
Three hundred bucks to have a machine spray a grocery-aisle's worth of air fresheners.
Maybe if we were as smell-focused as dogs, we'd be able to use this as a form of output. HEY! You could assign words different mixes of smells, and train your dog to delete spam!
...
Imagine your favorite sites...
Stiny Meat project: http://www.thespark.com/science/stinkymeat/
Stinky Feet project: http://www.thespark.com/science/stinkyfeet/
What a bad idea
AR
Sadly, the realaroma.com site is down, but the wayback machine still has it.
The picture of the SmellU-SmellMe software is priceless.
Good lord, does this really date to 1996? "I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." -- T.S. Eliot.
Great, so now not only can I be disgusted by the text content of my spam, when get a spam about "T3EN V1RGIN HORSE S3X 564ufghdfth", I will be able to smell it too! Thank you, Trisenx.
Does it interface with the i-loo?
Q: How do I know that I have been infected by a virus?
A: Depends. Win32.PukeMasterC smells like rotten food, MyFrood2 like swiss cheese..
while (!asleep()) sheep++
Smell you later!
THINK
If this were to be beneficial to anyone (and that's a big if) I'd want this unit to be fully configurable. I want the ability to block scents that are composed of the less pleasant scents in the unit. I want to block all scent-senders unless they're on my approved scent-sender list. I want to turn it off when I don't want to use it. I want excellent security on this thing to keep a virus or worm from triggering it. Basically, before I would even consider using this device, I'd want so much control and security on it that I doubt it would be cost effective for the company to sell it to me.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/05/13/1116206.shtm l?tid=109&tid=187
My computer should only smell like electrolytes leaking from cheap taiwainese capacitors, and the sweet smokey smell of a processor overheALKDTUKD
... is alive and well. The iSmell bombed before its horrible name ever got used outside of media. It takes a special (as in little school bus special) sort of mentality to think that since someone else failed horribly we can do the same thing and succeed. The iSmell failed so badly that one of their scientists has been reduced to spamming in order to try and sell a novelty pseudo-science book.
I mean, I'm all for maximum gizmoid activity, but this isn't a gizmo, it's just st00pid.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Because you could connect it your web-enabled refrigerator, and instead of ordering new food for you it could just cover up the funk of the old stuff.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
it just doesn't make any scents.
badda-bump-bump.
They can only think of two sensible uses for it, and they're both examples of spam.
Lovely... I'm going to pay 250GBP so companies can send more effective spam!
Yeah, so, anyway, I agree with the other 10000 posts saying this is a stupid idea.
spam will really smell like burnt spam. GENIOUS!
"most perfumes and scented products on the market contain chemicals that don't agree with everyone's airways.[...]Individuals with allergies can develop sensitivities (which are different from allergies) to perfumes. Clinicians say their symptoms can range from tearing and sneezing to migraines and life-threatening anaphylaxis."
-- except from this news article
And seriously, how close to the real smell would the artificial be? I assume it would somewhat abnoxious, just like those old scratch-and-sniff stickers. The beauty of smells is that they can vary -- e.g. depending upon how what ingredients are in the baked bread; or if the chicken is boiled, baked, or deep fried; etc.
Imagine broadband providers requiring you to have one of these to access their service. You don't pay for it up front, they just charge you $5/month to have it, like they do with modems now. Cartridges are provided dirt cheap. Then broadband providers sell access to their customers to spammers, who pay a little bit per message to get to the broadband customers with enhanced stinky email. Providers start raking in big bucks. You become another commodity they can sell to increase profits.
We know the whole system
1. Hook customers on your service
2. Sell them out for advertising
3. Profit
Apple zealots will rejoice to know they aren't being left out. Apple is currently in R&D for their own scent solution, currently called iSmell.
HP plans on branding their on version, based on Apple's technology. HP will call their version iSmellHP. Critics are a little worried over HP's naming though. One alpha tester was quoted as saying "Did that guy say I Smell like pee?!?"
Film @ 11.
Now, we can filter our email based on what it smells like. I propose legislation to require all spam to actually smell like SPAM. After smelling our email, we can train our bayesian filter to filter out the stuff that smells like spam.
If the product is as high quality as the online game then this will be a sure thing.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
You know, if you're going to follow me everywhere, at least post under a legitimate name instead of anonymously.
And if anyone wanted to see what I've posted earlier, it was only in defense to your trolling.
.. that's how this business idea smells to me.
Joke about packet sniffing in 3...2...1...
I've got this device that makes smells, which will interoperate well with the 3D VRML interweb. The only trick with this thing is reaching critical mass of eyeballs - no, scratch that, noseholes - so we'll have to give them out for free, and eat the GBP250 ($464 - yes, you read that right, that's what this thing costs - can you believe it's so cheap!) How, you ask. Simple. We'll get advertisers to pay for it! Quote: "Telewest say it could be used by supermarkets to tempt people with the smell of fresh bread or by holiday companies seeking to stir up images of sun-kissed beaches.
I forsee no problems whatsoever.
... how visionary Harold and Maude was! Odorifics, anyone?
brainfart brainfart brainfart brainfart, had enough of it, yet?
There's got to be a Futurama joke (with the Smell-o-scope) somewhere in here.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
get a lot of email that stinks. Absolutely no new hardware required... ...it's called spam.
...remember good 'ol times when IP used to mean Internet Protocol....
You can do the conversion yourself here.
Now people can send out flower and pollens SPAM and have the whole office sneezing.
"Buy our product because you'll be allergy free"
I can smell the spam now. I know I don't want to smell my email. Smell in a video/virtual reality game might be cool. Other than that, no thanks.
finally even clueless noobs can open their email and tell when they're being scamed... "well uncle bob sent me this email, and i trust him, eventhough it doesnt sound like something he'd say, that attachment looks pretty inticing.... but i smell a rat"
it also allows for easier spam filtering...
mail rules > if subject(smell) != null, move to trash...
because you know you're not gonna want to read anything from anyone who would actually use this.
Sniff, sniff... smells like spam!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Did anyone else notice that the Lawfirm's site is Mofo.com ?
I mean seriously, what self respecting law firm would take the doamin "mofo.com"? Are they really that stupid?
On the actual topic. This is really just a stunt to get thier name back into circulation. As they say, "no press is bad press".
"Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it."
This sounds like a 1999-era make-up-anything-and-sell-it-on-the-internet-becau se-its-new-and-people-will-love-it.
I just cannot imagine this being something people would even pay for. Too expensive, not portable, probably limited to 1-2 scents and what about people that smell things differently? I cannot smell sweet things like roses, but everything else is fine.
stupid,stupid,stupid! Give those developers a dope slap!
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
and all the efforts they put into regaining world domination from Americans.
Telewest say it could be used by supermarkets to tempt people with the smell of fresh bread or by holiday companies seeking to stir up images of sun-kissed beaches.
So we all need to shell out 300$ so we can get better advertising. This sounds like a company expecting people to pay for an extra half-screen attatchment for their monitors so they can pop-up advertisements. I have no idea why anyone would be interested in this.
I will say that maybe women will buy it. They seem to be interested in scented candles, perfume, whatever.
"Our sense of smell is directly connected to our emotions," said anthropologist Kate Fox, director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford.
I guess that's why everytime I smell something, I have a specific, unalterable emotional reaction? Riiiight. Better stick to anthropology, Kate!
We live in a society where we demand control over what we smell: We pick air fresheners for our home and car with scents we like. We use deoderants to make sure that if we smell, it's a smell we picked. We put on purfumes and calognes that we picked. And when we smell something we don't like, we'd sure like to change it or get away from it.
So why would someone allow someone else to pick what they're smelling? I don't think they would.
The only use for this thing that I can think of is a potpourri web site that would would let people download custom smells. Then the user would be picking the scent. But it's so much cheaper to just go to Wally World and buy an air freshener. This is destined to be a product the Sharper Image catalog, something that you buy when you have too much money to spend and need a silly gift for that person who already has all the useful things.
Does this concept make anybody here besides me think of the Mood Organ in Phillip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
No, I guess not. I'm probably the only one who read the book as well as watched Bladerunner.
Will someone be creating a new Spam filtering program, to filter out the smell of.... well, you can figure it out....
Why not just put some stinky cheese in a box and have a door that opens when the odour is needed?
Now I can have a more interesting experience at this website
Main Entry: smell
Function: noun
1 : the property of a thing that affects the olfactory organs : ODOR
2 a : the process, function, or power of smelling b : the special sense concerned with the perception of odor
3 a : a very small amount : TRACE b : a pervading or characteristic quality : AURA
4 : an act or instance of smelling
Can't wait to small Matrix and the dominatrix.
So can I start emailing farts and other bodily scents to neighbors and people I dont' like? :)
...and I'll bet that somebody's already working on an Emacs syntax highlighting mode that produces different smells based on C types.
Mmmmmmm, unsigned ints....
Maybe using string functions without bounds checking could smell really bad. Then you could really sniff out the bugs. Neat!
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
How about have one or two built in scents that turn on under the following conditions:
1) It has been over X days since you backed up your hard drive.
2) It has been over Y days since you checked for patches from your OS system vendor.
Perhaps if poorly maintained computers started to stink, people would not have to learn about backups, virii, and worms the hard way.
But wat iv I hab a cod? then I can't smell dat spam a mile away anymore. (NOTE for you humor challenged, the misspelling is intentional!)
-- DuckWing
It makes me shiver in fear for what the porn industry will do with this technology once they sink their teeth into this. It will totally revolutionize the fetish market in buying "once worn" female undergarments. Now you can get a preview of the scent of a woman right in a piece of spam message. Yack!
Just like the Colon-Cat Company, let them burn through their cash giving away this garbage for free, then pick 'em up by the bushel in about 18 months.
Yeah, right.
>>But the chance to sniff your e-mails not may
>>come cheap. Telewest says its "scent dome"
>>could cost around 250 and would only work with
>>a high-speed, broadband connection.
Thats because dial-up already stinks.
Unfortunatly, yes
Alright, who the hell's looking at PORN on company time!?
We can just hope that this doesn't show up in the next upgraded version of goatse.cx.
Perhaps it's really just some study to show how much free time slashdotters have that they can respond to just about the most nonsensical thing I've seen so far this year.
$250 for a bulky contraption that will stink up the house? A joke. It's not Apri1 1 is it?
Birthday Greeting to Grandpa.
Happy Birthday you old Fart!
I can't see this going mainstream. This will start and probably end as a luxury item for people who either have a ton of money to spend or just want to get every single peripheral out there. Then the option adding scent to your email can be available just like the option of having a voice/webcam feature in MSN conversations.
The last thing I want to be is smelling an email from a software engineer who's been pulling all nighters, working day and night and has 5-day accumulated body funk.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
This concept failed in the movie theatres with Smell o Vision. What makes people think it might work for a broad populace at that price?
I think the only people who might even consider using something like that are people in the cosmetics/perfume industry and 60 some odd scents wouldn't be enough for its high selective and linear market.
while i hate marketing, i hate even more the fact that some companies market their products without giving any information whatsoever about the product (e.g. perfume). this would help.
.ODR attachment in your inbox is not going to make you happy.
but i still would never buy the cartridge unless it came with a deodorizer, like an ozone generator or something. there are certainly a lot more shitty odors out there than good ones. chances are, that
Requires broadband?
"But the chance to sniff your e-mails not may come cheap. Telewest says its "scent dome" could cost around 250 and would only work with a high-speed, broadband connection"
This thing requires broadband to control only 20 scents? In an e-mail? C'mon. For what cockamamy reason does this nuisance need broadband?
Tho I gotta admit, its a great marketing scheme - think of the demographic sampling you could do.
I can't honestly think of a non-pervy use for this technology.
...
... Loads and Loads ...
Well, maybe it'd be interesting to get a 'smell-o-gram' that summarizes my e-mail filters, that could be interesting
"Mmmm... Peach!"
Alright, I change my mind. I can think of lots of uses for this
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Dear Nigel,
Please pull me bloody finger!
There'll be no poop for YOU!
Spam that smells like Spam (tm). I think this is a bad idea. :(
That's the stupidest fuckin' idea I've ever heard.
Man, just followed your links... he's been at that shit for over 9 years! Talk about sticktoitness!
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
Not so at all. Smell is actually a *very* big component of taste. Taste and Smell
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The average geeks smell bad enough. Get off your virtual girl PC and take a shower already!!
I
...a company saddled with 4 billion of debt who overcharge me for my broadband are investing in research such as this.
Pissed off that you got called on your obvious and frankly crappy karma whoring troll attempt?
If I want to smell something while playing a game, I can always just wait for my cat to crawl up on my lap and stick his butt in my face.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The stuff is only vaporware I tell ya!
...just glue a slice of spam to your nose and be done with it.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
But although most people here are flaming the idea, and the cost is a bit high, think about how many of your girlfriends/wives spend money on candles/incents/plug in the wall smelly devices/etc. Who's to say that this doesn't step it up a notch?
We're all thinking that it would just smell here at your desk, but what if you could remote in to make the house smell like fresh bread, or lilac, or roses, so when you get home, you've a bit more sense of peace. (Aromatherapy is a multi million dollar industry)
Think about the next time you're shopping for perfume for your wife/girlfriend/lover - You don't have to go to one of those absolutely frustrating stores like Macy's where people are attacking you with spray bottles, hoping you'll purchase their product. I like shopping without the harassment, thank you ever so much.
And finally, think of the future of virtual reality. Now you'll have sight, sound, and smell. Next is touch... which at that point I suppose I can make my very own Hollo-deck in my guest room, and live out my days on a hammock, with the scent of lily of the valley, while receiving oral pleasure by Jennifer Tilly.
woo haaaaa...
Maybe someone will remember the exact details; but I recall such a system being planned for TV around 1960+/- It was written up in one of the popular tech magazines of the time... Prior [f]art!
The only application for something like this is for enhanced immersion in virtual worlds. Now, if that didn't take off with hardcore gamers, why in the HELL would anyone want this asociated with EMAIL? WHY!?!!?!?!
My Snail mail doesn't smell like anything, so why would I want Email to?
They've tried to add scents to virtual reality entertainments for some time. There was a movie or two that had scratch-and-sniff cards for various scenes, signaled by a subtitle. The Disney Bugs Life VR ride emits scents at various times. (The Soaring over California ride too?) I thought the tactile F/X were more interesting.
Even france telecom has developed something like this called 'Exhalia' last year. Now, if these devices could generate any odour.. Imagine the possibility that hackers could use it generate pungent rotten egg odour just to prove their skills - something equivalent to defacing websites.
Even venture capitalists can be utter morons. What a complete waste of technology.
What the hell are they waisting all that time and money for?
For Fucks sake man....no one wants to hear their computer...why would they want to smell the damn thing?
Seriously, what a stupid thing to invent!
Spam would be just great ha???
pop-ups that smell like shit!
i am totally baffeled to think how this can be a good idea. I know they list a couple reasons for it, but really...its...its...i dont even know how to explain how lame this is. This GWB Lame.
You know those women who wear way too much perfume? Often times that are approximately 50 years old and their copious amounts of perfume is accompanied by too much makeup?
Well I work with a lady like that. I can smell her coming down the hall long before I ever see her! Then the scent of her bad perfume lingers in the air for like 10 minutes after she leaves.
Pretty much the same thing. I call it her "advanced aromatic scent projection subsystem", which emits her chosen scent (perfume) in a 100 meter radius.
What are they going to do about shifting smells? If you open an email that has a bad smell, such as spam and then you follow up by opening a personal one from your girlfriend that has some sort of rose petal smell, how would you get rid of that bad spam aroma?
Does this thing have fans, it doesn't look like it.
It was called Smell-O-Vision. I predict that this will have at least as much success.
by the Peee-yeeew Charitable Trust.
(you have no idea how long I have been waiting to use that line).
I don't think Telewest provide a dial-up service, so for it to work on Telewest you'd have to use broadband. Also it makes it sound more impressive to Joe Bloggs.
RealAroma was a real leader back in its day. I especially liked the SmellU-SmellMe client.
About 5 years ago, DigiScents developed a product called the iSmell, which was covered by Wired Magazine. It was even on the memoriable cover. They hired Marc Canter to be their visionary spokesguru:
They even had an SDK for programming the device. I talked with them at the game developers conference about a game I was working on that might benefit from smell. They thought it would be more fun, if you could smell when The Sims needed to take a shower, pissed their pants, or set the house on fire.For some reason, DigiScent's iSmell Digital Scent Technology never took off.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
My keyboads not woking popely.
Are the French still working on soap?
When you reached a certain point in the game, it would mention a smell, and you had to scratch the appropriate number on the card to see what it was... =)
http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/leather/leath er.html
Spammail
Snailmail
and now Smellmail
Probably will use "smail" as the MTA
Every single Brittish citizen is working on email that smells? oh, no, they are not. A British COMPANY is working with technology by an american COMPANY to make email that can make a smell.
nothing like over-generalizing for the sake of making a worthless story seem slightly bigger than it is.
also, when did anything that smells become interesting in the scope of the internet? never, that's when. Movie companies have played with smelly moves, TV companies with smelly TV, and you know what, it sucks.
this is as dumb as the napster story.
*sigh*
Breath, cars, food, you get the point.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
The carb, stem and chamber are instrumented with airflow and smoke density detectors. You can record a digital smoke envelope, and email it to your friends. You can scale and normalize any pre-recorded bong hit to your own lung capacity, or even mix and cross-fade between multiple bong hits.
MIDI Bong Version 2.0 will support quadratic multi-hit smoke interpolation, real-time streaming telebong control protocol, and head-to-head bonghit competitions.
More teathered and wireless base stations and portable units are in development: Personal iBong. Enterprise RackMount Bong Blade. Fast and Wide SCSI RAID Bong. PCMCIA BongCard OnTheGo. Portable USB Bongle. Firewire eBongPro. WiFi Residential Gateway Bong. Hands Free Bluetooth Bong.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I could see this back in '99 when companies came up with wonderful ideas like selling products for less than what they paid... but fuck man, smell?
And not even just smell, 200 for 6 different smells. How did they come up with any pratical uses for this?
"nm" means no message... so duh, there isn't anything here...
Ok well if you ARE reading this... why the hell would anyone want this? My god.
...that "smell-ya-later" would replace "goodbye".
On behalf of my country i just want to say sorry. Theres no story here, its a crap gimick with barely any use except as padding for some morning tv shows to talk about. Im not sure who is responsible for this, but be assured, the offices of Telewest are being raided under the Stupid Ideas Act (the US version was very successful in the prosecution of the CueCat people) and you wont have to worry about marketing hype like this anymore.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I wonder what a beowulf cluster smells like...
If they really want 'realism' what they need is a SMODEM (Smell Modulator Demodulator) that takes the smell from one user and sends them to another user.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Here Darl, can you smell that dairy-air ?
250GBP? For what is essentially an air freshener with a USB port? I think these guys spent too much time sniffing glue.
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
A Sound Blaster my computer has. A Smell Blaster it does not. Yet.
Sony ha
I scent this story to my grandma. I guess I odor an apology, she said it stinks so much that she'll whiff-draw my name from her will. I guess I'll have to get a job down at the Ol' factory. I guess it's no smell consolation that she may reekonsider, as it was a fragrant violation of my family's views. /end wretched punnery
Next thing we know, people will start sending prank farts through email!
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
There are three main problems: 1. It's expensive because you have to refill the cartridges. 2. The set of smells is too restricted to make it interesting. 3. Humans are very sensitive to smells. It's easy to get it wrong and put off the customer!
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
... from Skunkshot
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
I thought that the Interlok device was the most moronic idea that I had ever heard of, but this really blows that away. This is hands down the dumbest thing that I have ever heard of. Who the fuck would spend money on this? especially hundreds of dollars?
I pity anyone who invests in this lunacy.
The brits should learn how to master the toothbrush first!!!
-J
This should make the farts.com surfing experience more enjoyable!
The file formats developed cover both compressed and uncompressed transmission of scent: Nosepeg and .WIF
the e might not be effective for the situation described - just because someone's girlfriend won't do sexual things with them doesn't mean she won't be doing them with someone else (maybe she doesn't want them, or maybe she has multiple boyfriends that aren't known to him). Sending e to her could have the opposite of the desired effect (she goes out and has sex with someone else...).
They should make up a device that can fill an entire house or business with ANY smell within a few microseconds of receiving the appropriate signals. The LAW would require the presence and activation of these devices in ALL devices that can accept email messages. The LAW would also require that all spam mails include putrid, disgusting, nasty, gross, reeking odors. These devices would be programmed to emit EXTREME amounts of these odors for a time greater than 1 hour for each spam mail. I think this will be the best spam fighting technique.
Next, they should route sewage pipes over the heads of all computer users, with spam-activated valves that dump SHIT on peoples' heads whenever they receive a spam message.
Furthermore, filtering software should be made illegal, as should legitimate uses of email.
Ultimately, these innovative new technologies will get people to use their computers less and get out more often, thus reducing their reliance on email, thus reducing the market for spam mail, thus killing off this industry altogether.
And then, people who DESERVE to use computers (i.e., people who don't pass all kinds of stupid laws that restrict how computers can be used; people who don't download shit, slowing down the whole internet; people who don't send spam; etc.) could do so without interference from all these assholes.
This is one of those stories that make me wonder how people's hopes and aspirations work. Does anybody wake up in the morning thinking, "What utterly useless bit of technology do I want to be remembered for?"
I am allergic to ALL cosmetic smells.
As olfactory cues are the only sense signals that are not intermediated before innervating with higher brain areas, this seems to me to be of the same order of interest as the recent nerve-on-chip story that was slashdotted recently. As a result, you could probably use something like this with more subtlety (with the right software etc) and to better effect than the suggested use (issuing the smell of bovine faeces as the latest 419 hits your inbox :)).
Interesting background refs: (not related to the product)
Link
and
Link
I say we get/manufacture a cartridge full of excrement, and send smell-mails to all the spammers. Better yet, "smell-spam" the spammers. Nothing they could do about it; it's what they've been doing.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Criminy, I wish those people would put even *half* the effort they're putting into "improving" email into improving their food...especially their chocolate (attention English people! Someone since the Aztecs has come up with the brilliant idea of adding in *sugar!*)